New Photorealism, as represented by Bryan Hitch, Greg Land, or John Cassaday, is centred around a naturalistic understanding of the human form. In that, its practitioners continue the artistic legacy of Neal Adams. All the more jarring are images, that deviate from common conceptions of „the good body,“ in the sense of a correctly drawn body according to an naturalistic ideal. Greg Land, for example, often draws women’s hips so unnaturally small, that it’s sometimes read as outright obscene. And his male heroes are beefed up to grotesque proportions, with heads that appear grafted on their torsos instead of grown out of their bodies naturally. Hitch, too, displays an occasional insecurity with his figure work, although his inadequacies are never as annoying as Land’s quirks can be.

For my money, John Cassaday is the most assured of these artists. The inevitable weak or bad images are very few within his body of work and mostly limited to single panels. One such drawing – less bad, more irritating in its understanding of anatomy and perspective — can be found on the final splash page of Cassaday & Rick Remender’s Uncanny Avengers 1 (Remender/Cassaday 2013: unpaginated). Or so it might appear, at first.

In terms of composition, Cassaday captures the scene from two different perspectives at once. One is from the point of view of readers looking up to the Skull, who thus appears removed onto a position above. On the other hand, readers themselves look down on Professor X’s corpse, which, in the logic of the picture, is meant to be raised to an upright position. With his depiction of Xavier, Cassaday taps into the popular iconography of post-mortem examinations. On TV shows, in movies, and in comics, scenes are established as autopsies through flat compositions showing a dead body in the middle of its opening. The real or an imagined camera looks down from the ceiling onto a color-, blood-, and lifeless person calmly lying under the knife of an examiner (Fig. 2). Such establishing shots are then followed by cuts to more detailed images and close-ups.

In drawing his scene as a view from a low and a top angle, Cassaday puts two different events – triumph and autopsy – onto the page, simultanously. He’s drawing two distinct actions into one. That he succeeds with this should not be taken for granted. After all, the artist therein contradicts a general rule of sequential arts – without as much as breaking it, it must be stressed –:

Pro-Tip: Ask for 1 clear action per panel.
Don’t ask your artist to do 2, 3, or more things in a shot.
You want those? Add more panels.

The formalist quality of Cassaday’s brand of photorealism can be strongly felt in images like these. Cassaday has always been stronger as a layouter of multilayered, yet clear and purposeful single images, than as an artist of the human form. Although that doesn’t mean that his anatomies aren’t accomplished, or that the artist treats anatomy as secondary to his style’s specific look. Not even in cases like the here discussed splash image, with the Red Skull’s peculiar left arm. This arms appears to be a few centimetres too short to look just naturally, at least to my eye.

Should this somewhat irritating gesture not reach further into the room? Especially from this sharp angle, and considering its thriumphant nature? Or did that drawing come out exactly how it‘s supposed to be, no accident, but a precise rendering of the artist’s creative vision?

I for one mean: Yes! Every detail in this chapter’s climactic final image is deliberately and carefully chosen upon. That seemingly too short arm can be read as a statement of artistic intent: It’s a paradigm for the way natural appearance is understood in the comics of John Cassaday. And it allows us to also draw certain conclusions about how naturalness is genrally understood in superhero comics.